TYPO Berlin 2013 Touch
About the speaker

Piotr Rypson

Piotr Rypson is Deputy Director for Research at the National Museum in Warsaw and holds a PhD in literary studies (University of Warsaw, 2002). He is guest lecturer at various universities and colleges in Europe and USA; visiting professor of graphic design and visual communication at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA (1997 – 2003), as well as curatorial studies at the Department of Art History, University of Warsaw. Between 1990 – 2009 he curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art, design history, artists’ books and visual literature, etc. He is the author of 7 books and over 200 articles on art, information architecture, visual communication and literature, as well as co-author of a TV documentary scenarios “Man and his Signs”.

Recently Piotr Rypson has published a monograph on Polish graphic design 1919 – 1949 (Against all Odds; Karakter: 2011) and has co-authored a book on Polish avant-garde poet, Jan Brzekowski (Kilométrage. Jan Brzekowski und seine Künstlerwelten, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Koenig: 2011). Currently works on an exhibition on Tadeusz Peiper and a series or texts on design and literature & technology.

To create a new MyTYPO account

Identity survival

Fast-paced presentation of turns and twists of graphic design in Poland in the 20th and 21st century is an attempt to provide stylistic and historical context to the developments in this area. The audience will be guided through the birth of “national style” and its avant-garde rivals, early mass-media designing and the formation of high-brow, socialist esthetics vs. authoritarian, militarized communication design of the 1920s and 1930s, the postwar “battle of book covers” and the birth of eclectic “Polish Poster School”. The visual rhetoric of the real-socialist state will be juxtaposed with individual visual languages of the political and cultural opposition – closing with a discussion of the visual communication landscape after the capitalist deluge of marketing imagery.